Words and Numbers: The Many Languages of Nineteenth-Century Pitch Standardization

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-34
Author(s):  
Fanny Gribenski
Keyword(s):  
Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.


This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.


Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 456-461
Author(s):  
Ernest Caulfield

IN VIEW of the tremendous advance in pediatrics during the past half century, one might think that a full century ago no one could have known very much about the care of children. To read the newspapers of that day, one might also conclude that it was an age primarily of quacks and patent medicines—of worm cures, hive syrups and of little liver pills. But to appreciate the true status of American pediatrics in 1855 one must judge it not only by the standards of our time but also by the standards of a century earlier, and when that is done it will be seen that American pediatrics in the mid-Nineteenth Century had also made considerable progress. In 1755 the care of the sick was generally in the hands of well-meaning yet untrained practical nurses whereas in 1855 people were turning to physicians who were usually medical school graduates, well acquainted with a vast number of new and important publications. More and more pediatric articles were appearing in the many American journals; and in the review of a new book, one writer mentioned "the numerous publications on the management of infants and children with which the press has been loaded." Indeed, the press was loaded, for the Philadelphia physician had at his command no less than 8 fairsized textbooks in English devoted exclusively to the care of children. The second quarter of the Nineteenth Century saw a definite trend toward pediatrics as a specialty. There is no need to discuss here the numerous elementary guides which were intended primarily for mothers and which were precursors of the textbooks, or the many systems of general medicine with their chapters on pediatric subjects, especially since this trend may be well illustrated by mentioning only the impressive list of textbooks published in Philadelphia.


2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 325-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Spaulding

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.


Author(s):  
Elad Yaron

Abstract Personal expression was generally not part of the job requirements of trade-painters in nineteenth-century Canton, China. They were asked to produce paintings tailored to their Western consumers’ interests, wishes, and needs. Yet, in the middle of this “art-world” lies an enigma: a set of thirteen paintings depicting the workshop of the trade-painter Tingqua, which seem, at first glance, to be duplicates of a mundane product of the industry. Closer examination, however, reveals not only that each of these versions is unique, but also that the series as a whole is actually extraordinary. The workshop paintings are full of details, including various quotes written in calligraphy, which would not have been understood either by Western or even by most Chinese viewers, but only by members of the scholar-gentry, that is, the literati of China. The main question we face before this thirteen-piece puzzle is: why did the artist plant messages or integrate codes in paintings that were sent to a world in which nobody could decode them? I propose that these workshop paintings be read as a self-portrait of a person living in a world that is witnessing a contest between two substantially different momentous cultures, each struggling to prove its superiority or dominance. Watching the demise of an old world to which he himself was contributing, Tingqua decided to treasure some of its features despite knowing that those who purchased the works would not be able to appreciate them.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sardella

In 1798, William Curtis published the sixth and last volume of Flora Londinensis, a beautifully coloured catalogue of over 400 plants that grew in London and in its nearby fields. Less than 300 copies were sold, and while the book was considered scientifically important, it was a financial failure (Field 106). Firstly, Flora Londinensis was prohibitively expensive because of its coloured plates, and secondly, the many illustrations of wild grasses and common plants included in the book failed to interest an audience outside of a small group of medical doctors and aristocratic hobby-botanists. The project, however, was not a complete failure for Curtis. While publishing Flora Londinensis, Curtis launched a considerably more successful, similarly formatted periodical for a slightly broader audience called Botanical Magazine. Botanical Magazine featured coloured plates of newly discovered exotic plants that satisfied the tastes of the public. It was published in thin issues containing only three plates each, and at a price of one shilling per monthly issue, Botanical Magazine was affordable enough for more readers to justify paying for the magazine’s exciting, colourfully illustrated content.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-242
Author(s):  
Isabelle Richet

This paper discusses the symbiotic relationship that developed between English-language periodicals published in Italy and major reading rooms in Rome and Florence. This relationship took various configurations – from Luigi Piale in Rome, who opened a reading room and published the weekly The Roman Advertiser, to the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence that provided access to the many English-language periodicals published in Italy – and created important spaces of transnational cultural interaction. The paper looks at the cultural practices and the forms of sociability represented by the reading of periodicals and the patronizing of reading rooms as ‘imported traditions’ brought to Italy by the many British cultured travellers and residents in the nineteenth century. It identifies the actors who promoted these cultural practices (editors, librarians, cosmopolitan intellectuals) and analyses their role as mediating figures who created in-between spaces where cross-cultural exchanges unfolded. The paper also discusses the broader transnational cultural dynamic at work as those cultural practices imported from England favoured a greater engagement of British visitors and expatriates with the Italian political and cultural environment.


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